Pacific jumps from Big West to WCC

The University of the Pacific Tigers will come to San Diego for conference athletic events starting in 2013. The road trip from Stockton, though, just got three miles shorter.

Pacific announced Wednesday it is jumping from the Big West to the West Coast Conference, which it helped found in 1952 and then left in 1971. The move becomes official on July 1, 2013.

That’s the same day San Diego State moves to Big East in football and the Big West in almost everything else. But instead of coming to Montezuma Mesa for conference games, Pacific will get off Interstate 5 a few exits earlier and head up the hill to USD.

Translated into men’s basketball Xs and Os: The Toreros’ league figures to get tougher, and the Aztecs’ future league even weaker.

Already, there has been concern about Steve Fisher’s nationally relevant basketball program joining one of the country’s worst conferences – going from the Mountain West, ranked fifth in conference RPI the last two seasons, to the Big West, with was rated 25th and 26th. Now it loses Pacific, which went 11-19 this season (with no seniors) but is the last Big West team to beat SDSU and the conference’s only current member to win an NCAA Tournament game in the past 20 years.

The nine-member WCC has six schools that have won tournament games over that time: USD, Gonzaga, Saint Mary’s, BYU, Pepperdine and Santa Clara.

Bob Thomason, in his 24th year at Pacific, became the winningest coach in Big West history this season with his 406th victory. The Tigers also had a No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft, center Michael Olowokandi in 1998, and beat Big East teams in the NCAA Tournament in 2004 and 2005. And at Wednesday’s news conference in Stockton, Pacific athletic director Ted Leland pledged “public and tangible commitments” to ramp up support for men’s basketball.

Throw in WCC newcomer BYU, plus perennial Top 25 programs in Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s, and the rebuilding project by Toreros coach Bill Grier might require a few more bricks.

“The whole point of why you do this is to compete,” said USD athletic director Ky Snyder, who chairs the WCC executive council that examined various expansion options. “I’d hate to be in a conference of one and win it every year. Competition sharpens everybody. Hey, if we have to step up our game, we have to step up our game. That’s just the deal.”

Pacific’s move was the best and worst kept secret in Big West circles. The timing of Wednesday’s announcement came as a surprise, but rumors had been swirling for years, even decades, that the Tigers considered themselves a better fit in a league of small, faith-based institutions than as the only private school in a forest of giant, public campuses from the CSU and UC systems. And SDSU officials privately said they were aware of the possibility/probability when negotiating with the Big West last fall.

The process was likely accelerated last summer when Leland, the longtime athletic director at Stanford with deep ties in the NCAA, began his second stint as AD at his alma mater. WCC commissioner Jamie Zaninovich is a Stanford alum and spent several years working under Leland there.

Leland said Pacific would add men’s soccer beginning in 2015 and at least one women’s sport while conducting a thorough analysis of the entire sports menu. The move also gets the WCC to 10 schools, eliminating the scheduling headaches with an odd number.

It could be good news for UC San Diego and its Div. I aspirations, too. Earlier this month students voted down a referendum 6,470 to 4,673 that would have doubled student athletic fees to fund a move from Div. II. But it was contingent on acceptance into a Div. I conference by 2014, and the Big West – the only viable option – had declined UCSD’s previous overtures.

Pacific’s exit, then, may open the door for the Tritons and remove that sticky contingency from any future referendums, which Edwards hopes to have again in a year or two.

“It’s very different when you’re responding to an invitation versus the position we were in, where we were hoping the Big West would accept us as a member,” UCSD athletic director Earl Edwards said. “I think it would have made a tremendous difference.

“I still feel (Div. I) is not a question of if for us, it’s a question of when. With all these leagues changing, I anticipate this will go on for the next two or three years. And anytime there is movement, it gives us hope that we can get into the mix.”